Making Bacon

I’d imagine, after the ubiquitous chicken, bacon is right up there as one Britain’s most popular meats. Indeed, we apparently get through 800,000 tonnes of it a year. The problem is, the vast majority of this is really not very good quality. As this report in the Telegraph says, the majority of it is made from imported pigs, reared in very poor conditions. Not only is this cruel on the pigs (which are of course extremely intelligent animals, more than capable of outwitting me at most things) but animals raised this way undoubtedly produce low quality pork and bacon.

On top of this, mass produced bacon is cured in a manner which gets it on the shelves quickly but results in a significantly inferior product. As Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall says in his Meat book, rather than rubbing the meat with salt over a number of days, “industrial curing… attempts to cure the meat ‘instantly’ by the direct injection of an artificially flavoured and E-number laced brine, using thousands of tiny hollow needles”. All that white stuff that leaches out when you fry cheap bacon? Clearly that’s not meat – it’s just the injected brine escaping. Yum.

Of course, it doesn’t have to be like this. It’s not too hard to get great bacon. Most good butchers who make their own and take pride in their work will be able to supply you with excellent bacon, hopefully from local pigs reared to a higher standard. This is definitely true of my regular butchers, Ellisons in Cullingworth. It’s a Guild of Q butchers, so you know you’re getting a quality product, and they do something that I, as someone who gets a bit nervous when questioning butchers and the like about their products, love: they display on a board where all their pork, lamb, chicken, etc. has come from – saving shy types like me from having to ask! Most of their pork comes from Anna’s Happy Trotters and happily, it’s usually excellent.

Bacon after a couple of days curing

So there’s really no need to make your own bacon. But it’s always fun to try these things, and I wanted to give it a go! It’s surprisingly easy, needs no specialist equipment and tastes amazing! It’s also probably much cheaper than buying loads of high quality bacon (which is the only bacon to buy). Despite this, my butcher’s reaction when I mentioned that this is what I would be using the pork I had just bought for would suggest that not too many people try it. His face lit up as he regaled me with tales of eccentric customers who had taken on the challenge over the years, including the farmer who’d bring a whole pig in to be butchered each autumn so he could make enough bacon to get him through the inevitably harsh winter at his remote hilltop farm.

I’m sure that guy is in a different league to me, but as I say, I’m really pleased with the results. I used belly pork and have therefore made streaky bacon, so it’s more like pancetta. I’ve used approximate measurments because you might need more or less of the cure, but it’ll give you an idea of how much you need for a good chunk of bacon that will last you a while. I used:

A piece of good quality belly pork (about 1.3kg)

For the salt cure

About 350g of coarse sea salt

About 185g of soft brown sugar

About 10g of ground black pepper

A couple of sprigs of rosemary, leaves chopped

A few oregano leaves, chopped

2 bay leaves, crushed

To make bacon

Mix all of the ingredients for the cure together and put in an air tight plastic container. Grab handfuls of the cure and rub it all over the pork belly, coating it thinly on all sides – use plenty, but remember this amount of cure should last you about a week. Put the meat in an airtight, non-metallic container (I just used tupperware) and store in a cool, dark place (the cellar worked well). Keep the remainder of your cure in a cupboard

Check your pork after a day and you’ll see that a lot of liquid has escaped from the meat. Pour this away then coat the meat with some of the cure you made yesterday then put it back in its container and store it away for another day. Repeat this process on a daily basis for about a week, and you have bacon! Whoop! Apparently the bacon can be cured for as little as four or five days, or as much as 10. I just did mine for around a week. It came out pretty good and is great in stews, salads and pasta dishes. It will keep a while wrapped in baking paper in the fridge, but it tastes so good I don’t think it’ll be hanging around too long!